Last time we looked at BuddyPress themes, the choice wasn't that great, luckily the situation has improved slightly and there are a few more quality themes available. ThemeForest has even opened a new BuddyPress category on the site to encourage theme designers.

Huddle

Huddle is a clean, robust and easy to use community theme designed and developed for WordPress and make compatible to run seamlessly with both BuddyPress and bbPress plugins installed. Finally, a community theme that is both elegant, clean, modern, and easy to use, with top notch features and functionality out of the box.

Salutation

Salutation is a WordPress and BuddyPress theme. If you’re not familiar with BuddyPress, it’s a social network plugin for WordPress allowing your website to become a fully functional community portal. BuddyPress lets your users interract through groups, forums, friends, status updates, private messaging and a lot more.

Mingle

Mingle is an amazing WordPress theme and it’s BuddyPress ready! If you’re not familiar with BuddyPress, it’s a social network plugin for WordPress allowing your website to become a fully functional community portal. BuddyPress lets your users interract through groups, forums, friends, status updates, private messaging and a lot more.

Angus

This is a Buddypress compatible version of the Angus Wordpress theme. Allthough the themes look almost identical, the admin and functionality are quite different. If you want the flexibility of the front end editor or need Buddypress compatibility you should choose this version.

Gratitude

Gratitude is a responsive BuddyPress and a Wordpress Theme, which can adapt to any screen resolution, whether you are viewing it from your smartphone or 27” screen, carefully handcrafted to suit your needs. Never heard of BuddyPress? BuddyPress is a WordPress plugin which allows your website to become a social network, a full-fledged community website. BuddyPress enables your users to interact with each other through status updates, groups, forums, friend system, internal messaging system, and a whole lot more.

12 thoughts on “10 New & Fresh BuddyPress Themes for 2012”

I have tried buddy press and I would not recommend anyone who doesn’t know how to code stay far away from it. I used it for 3 months and caved it in because of poor support. The only support or documentation was very technical and actual developers on the forum are not easily reached.
Trouble trouble trouble. As for mingle forums… i use it and it’s easy to learn and works very well.

BuddyPress is still very new, in open source projects, support options grow as the user base and deployment of that software grows. I would suggest that you try buddypress in a few months or an year. Hopefully the community support options will be much better then.

About documentation being very technical, again in open source projects, most documentation you see in early stages is coming from technical people explaining different aspects of their software to their peers, other technologically savvy people. This too will improve as more non-technical people join in. In case of buddypress this project might always lack attention from non-techies, unlike WordPress, BuddyPress is targeted towards advanced users who want to deploy social networking layers to their community projects. However, I am very optimistic that it will improve a lot in coming days.

BuddyPress is still very new, in open source projects, support options grow as the user base and deployment of that software grows. I would suggest that you try buddypress in a few months or an year. Hopefully the community support options will be much better then.

About documentation being very technical, again in open source projects, most documentation you see in early stages is coming from technical people explaining different aspects of their software to their peers, other technologically savvy people. This too will improve as more non-technical people join in. In case of buddypress this project might always lack attention from non-techies, unlike WordPress, BuddyPress is targeted towards advanced users who want to deploy social networking layers to their community projects. However, I am very optimistic that it will improve a lot in coming days.

Huddle is a disgrace. Ran into bugs all over the place, including multiple image/CSS issues. Ended up asking for a refund from Theme Forest. Salutation, on the other hand, is one of the most feature-rich themes I’ve used.

Good to see that there are more and more buddypress themes being released, I agree with “Marketingseo” that it can be difficult to get things done at first but it offers a lot of great functionality!

I have actually just released a premium buddypress theme myself because I didn’t think there were enough out there! I wanted something that offers visitors a similar experience to sites like twitter/facebook.